The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) recently revealed results of a survey in which Storage Networking World conference attendees voiced their concerns and frustrations with implementing storage technologies in their organisations. Here's a synopsis of what the survey revealed.
The survey was headed up by Laurence Whittaker, vice chair of the SNIA's End User Council (EUC). Whittaker and fellow EUC chair Rick Bauer incorporated the survey’s results into a formal report entitled Top Ten Pain Points Survey.
The survey clearly indicates that end users are struggling to meet their companies’ cost containment objectives and to justify expenditures to improve their storage infrastructures.
Storage cost was identified as the top user pain point. As a commodity, disk storage has become less expensive, driving the demand for increased data storage. The supporting infrastructure and management tools are still expensive. Usually the infrastructure is complex and interoperability issues make storage networks difficult to scale to meet the increased demand. Cost issues are compounded by the need for more highly skilled storage professionals. Sixty-nine percent of respondents said they had delayed storage network purchases because of a factor related to cost. As a result, many respondents said they were starting small and attempting to grow their storage area networks while managing growth and capacity needs -- the second biggest pain point. This caused companies to have multiple SAN networks, management domains and tools, leading to even more difficulty managing their storage infrastructure.
The report goes on to say that the storage solutions that are currently designed and implemented vary from customer to customer and supplier to supplier. Many are well-designed and supported solutions. Some are clearly over-provisioned, making them inefficient and difficult to scale, thereby driving up costs.
